[Tutor] AntiSpam measures circumventing

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 02:00:54PM +0200, Luca Ferrari wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 4:50 PM, Jugurtha Hadjar
> <jugurtha.hadjar at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Supposing my name is John Doe and the e-mail is john.doe at hotmail.com, my
> > e-mail was written like this:
> >
> > REMOVEMEjohn.doSPAMeSPAM at REMOVEMEhotmail.com'

I don't think very many spammers bother with harvesting email addresses 
from web sites these days. It's much easier to just buy a list of 20 
million email addresses from some marketing company, which probably got 
them from Facebook, or harvest them from people's Outlook address book 
via spyware.


> This is the point: how easy you want to make the email for a human
> being.

I use a tiny bit of Javascript, like this:

    <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
        <!-- 
        var name = "tutor";
        var domain = "pearwood.info";

        function print_mail_to_link() 
            {
            document.write("<a href=\"mailto");
            document.write(":" + name + "@");
            document.write(domain + "\">" + name + "@" + domain + "<\/a>");
            }

        //-->
    </SCRIPT>


plus a bit of HTML like this:

    <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">print_mail_to_link()</SCRIPT>
    <NOSCRIPT>tutor at pearwood dot info</NOSCRIPT>


If a visitor has Javascript enabled, which I expect will cover 95% of 
visitors, they see a mailto link. The rest see something trivial to 
reverse into a real email address.

And even that, I'm wondering if I'm being too cautious.


-- 
Steven